Hans Rosling: Religions and babies

Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates. In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development—with some surprisingly good news—snaps into sharp focus. Full bio » The number of children [per family] is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.” (Hans Rosling)

Open data panel MSIS 2012

Open data panel msis

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Open data panel msis

by Carlo Vaccari on May 18, 2012

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Datavisualization.ch: A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools

07 MAY 2012 BENJAMIN WIEDERKEHR TOOLS FLASH, JAVASCRIPT, PROCESSING, R

A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools

When I meet with people and talk about our work, I get asked a lot what technology we use to create interactive and dynamic data visualizations. At Interactive Things, we have a set of preferred libraries, applications and services that we use regularly in our work. We will select the most fitting tool for the job depending on the requirements of the project. Sometimes a really simple tool is all you need to create something meaningful. On other occasions, a more multifaceted repertoire is needed. But how does one choose the right thing to use? An endless list of every tool available, does not answer that question and a recommendation from a friend is oftentimes more valuable.

That’s why we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. We called it selection.datavisualization.ch. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code. We will keep this list as a living repository and add / remove things as technology develops. We hope this will help you find the best tool for your next job.

Let me answer the most likely questions right away: No, not everything find its’ way into this list, so you might not find your personal favorite. Yes, some of the libraries mentioned are brand spanking new and may not be ready for production while others already have successors, but they still provide a good service.

IT tools for statistics, visualization, open data

IT tools for statistics, visualization, open data

IT tools for statistics, visualization, open data 29 viewsSeminar "Opening Financial Data in Turkey: transparency, accessibility and citizen involvement" "IT tools for statistics, visualization, open data" Carlo Vaccari Ankara, April 19 2012

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reegle.info – linked (open) energy data cloud

The Semantic Puzzle

reegle.info – linked (open) energy data cloud

April 13, 2012 by Martin Kaltenböck

Access to the latest high quality information on renewables, energy efficiency and climate change is fundamental to the acceleration of the clean energy marketplace, facilitating investments, promoting new legislation and regulations and broadening interest and knowledge in the sector.

reegle.info acts as a unique clean energy information portal, targeting specific stakeholders including governments, project developers, businesses, financiers, NGOs, academia, international organizations and civil society. Alongside comprehensive country energy profiles, energy statistics and a directory of relevant stakeholders it also offers the clean energy search and an extensive glossary. There is also an insightful clean energy blog with interesting and up-to-date background information.

As reegle.info provides relevant clean energy data from several key energy open data sources as for instance OpenEI, World Bank Data or the UK Open Data Portal the reegle.info Information Gateway has a strong need for efficient and automated data management mechanisms and technologies! Therefore REEEP (The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership) decided to use Linked Open Data (LOD).

Linked Open Data provides a powerful way for reegle.info for sustainable data management and data integration – thereby the current reegle.info linked (open) energy data cloud came into being and looks as follows:

The figure of the reegle.info linked (open) energy data cloud above shows the model behind the scenes of the reegle.info clean energy information gateway providing an insight about sources and respective connections / links between the several sources and data sets.

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National Statistical Offices: Independent, Identical, Simultaneous Actions Thousands of Miles Apart

National Statistical Offices: Independent, Identical, Simultaneous Actions Thousands of Miles Apart

Posted on February 2, 2012

Several weeks ago, at the initiative of Brian Pink, the Australian statistician, leaders of the government statistical agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States held a summit meeting to identify common challenges and share information about current initiatives.  While there had been casual sharing of partial information in previous years among these leaders, this event was unprecedented. 

The five countries share languages and some cultural features; they vary in size and in the organization of their statistical systems.  They also vary in the current health of their national economies, their regional economic foci, and key social and political issues.   None of them have population registers with mandatory updating features.  The legal frameworks of the countries’ statistical systems give different powers to the chief statistician.

While meetings of this character happen periodically in many sectors, the findings of the meeting were notable on one dimension – the five countries’ statisticians report that the strategic activities now being mounted are very nearly identical.  They perceive the same likely future challenges for central government statistical agencies, and they are making similar organizational changes to prepare for the future.  While they vary in specific current innovations, the components of the full future vision are remarkably similar.

Ingredients of the future vision:

1. The volume of data generated outside the government statistical systems is increasing much faster than the volume of data collected by the statistical systems; almost all of these data are digitized in electronic files.
2. As this occurs, the leaders expect that relative cost, timeliness, and effectiveness of traditional survey and census approaches of the agencies may become less attractive.
3. Blending together multiple available data sources (administrative and other records) with traditional surveys and censuses (using paper, internet, telephone, face-to-face interviewing) to create high quality, timely statistics that tell a coherent story of economic, social and environmental progress must become a major focus of central government statistical agencies.
4. This requires efficient record linkage capabilities, the building of master universe frames that act as core infrastructure to the blending of data sources, and the use of modern statistical modeling to combine data sources with highest accuracy.
5. Agencies will need to develop the analytical and communication capabilities to distill insights from more integrated views of the world and impart a stronger systems view across government and private sector information.
6. There are growing demands from researchers and policy-related organizations to analyze the micro-data collected by the agencies, to extract more information from the data.

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Forbes: Improving Decision Making in the World of Big Data

Christopher Frank, Contributor

Fearlessly tackling analytic issues to improve decision making.

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3/25/2012 @ 11:42AM |980 views

Improving Decision Making in the World of Big Data

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‘Big Data’ is having its 15-minutes of fame. It is the hot term referring to the increasingly large datasets of information being amassed as a result of our social, mobile, and digital world. In the past 12-months, the use of the term in the U.S. has increased 1,211% on the internet.

Lack of data is not the issue. Lack of strategy is.



IBM estimates that every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created – so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. It is mind-boggling. The irony is we have more information available, but we feel less informed.

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Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

From: http://book.flowingdata.com/

A book by Nathan Yau who writes for FlowingData, Visualize This is a practical guide on visualization and how to approach real-world data. The book is published by Wiley and is available on Amazon and other major online booksellers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 — Telling Stories with Data

Chapter 2 — Handling Data

Chapter 3 — Choosing Tools to Visualize Data

Chapter 4 — Visualizing Patterns over Time

Chapter 5 — Visualizing Proportions

Chapter 6 — Visualizing Relationships

Chapter 7 — Spotting Differences

Chapter 8 — Visualizing Spatial Relationships

Chapter 9 — Designing with a Purpose

There are lots of books on visualization that describe best practices and design concepts, but what do you do when it comes time for you to actually make something?

If you don't know how to use the software in front of you, the abstract isn't all that useful. And with growing amounts of data, it's becoming more important to be able to make sense of and communicate with it all.

In Visualize This, Nathan Yau teaches you how to create graphics that tell stories with real data, and you'll have fun in the process. Learn to make statistical graphics in R, design in Illustrator, and create interactive graphics in JavaScript and Flash & Actionscript.

Yau draws from his experience as a graduate student in statistics and his work with major news organizations for an engaging, data-first approach. After all, visualization is about the data it's based on.

Chapters group examples and tutorials by data type and take you through the process of data exploration and analysis, to visuals, and finally, to a graphic that is fit for publication for print and online.

Read the book cover-to-cover, or keep it on your desk as a reference for your data projects. Pages are in full color with tons of graphics to inspire and to help you learn visually

Open data: Jimmy Wales and the Man from Sweden - Web Exclusive Article - Significance Magazine

Open data: Jimmy Wales and the Man from Sweden - Web Exclusive Article - Significance Magazine
Author: Julian Champkin

Jimmy Wales at the Gottlieb Duttweiler

Awards Show, 2011. Image by Thomas

Entzeroth (photographer) on behalf

of Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute/Wikimedia .

Last week we learned that Jimmy Wales , the founder of Wikipedia, is to act as an unpaid adviser to the UK Government on opening up data to the public. His history is involving people in creating public content; so the appointment is to be welcomed. The more data we all can see, the more open our government, and the better-served is democracy.

But data is not always enough on its own. The government already releases great quantities of data about its spending, for example; every item of local government spending over £500, for example, is available to the public by law; go towww.data.gov.uk  to find it. Health and education data are there as well. The equivalent site for US government data is www.data.gov . The problem is, though, that what you will usually find at these sites are huge spreadsheets of numbers – pounds or dollars spent, or numbers of people in various categories, and it is not remotely obvious what the numbers mean or what story they tell.

For data to have meaning it must be interpreted, and that is the rub. BBC Radio Four’s Today programme on Tuesday this week had an item on the issue of open data which included an interview with Hans Rosling. Rosling of course is the Swede and statistician who made statistics a hit on prime time television with his Joy of Stats series last year. You can read a Significance interview with him here. BBC Radio Four’s interviewer asked him if there can be such a thing as too much data; you can hear his answer here .

Hans Rosling. Image by

Tobias Andersson Åkerblom .

Rosling’s point was that making data openly available breaks the monopoly of the state. He checks train delays on his commute into Stockholm each morning, using an app which taps in to live data on which trains are running late. The app has improved his life; but, he says, governments would not have thought of writing the app; it is the availability of data that makes it possible, but some genius then wrote the app to use that data – interpreted it – to the public, in other words. ‘It is the value added to the data which makes it useful to the public, not the data itself.

There are of course issues of privacy. In Sweden and Norway , how much every citizen earns is public knowledge, because the government publishes everyone’s tax returns. ‘Britain is a bit old-fashioned not to do that’ he says. But an individual’s health records, he says, should not be publicly available. ‘It is no-one’s business but my own what the results of my HIV test turn out to be.’

How to decide what should be public? ‘Judge each case on its merits’ he says. Can you have too much data? ‘Can you have too many books? No. you just have to know what you have.’

Standards for statistical data dissemination: a wish list

Standards for statistical data dissemination: a wish list

View more PowerPoint from Xavier Badosa

The digitization of information exchange processes has led in many industries to define standards to be used in the B2B side of the value chain for the conversations between key partners. The agencies involved in statistical production are not an exception and need to agree on standards that can be used in the exchange of data and metadata between them. However, before these standards have been fully adopted, new needs have arisen that have stressed the importance of machine readable formats for the reuse of the public sector information. Open data initiatives have usually found a strategic ally in the statistical offices because timeliness, punctuality and accessibility are part of the code of practice in official statistics. This has increased the necessity of standards not only for data exchange between organizations specializing in statistical production but also for dissemination to third parties. The presentation will try to address the requirements that the dissemination standards should meet in this new context.

A new Info Space on Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX)

Eurostat

A new Info Space on Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX)

Published on 29/02/2012

To help you get familiar with the SDMX international standard for data and metadata exchange, Eurostat has opened a new SDMX Info Space offering quick reference guides, news, updates on implementation activities, an inventory of available software tools and links to training tutorials.

Through the SDMX Info Space you can play or download the new set of self-learning videos and student books which explain SDMX from A to Z. We suggest starting with Welcome to SDMX (why and how SDMX can help you). After watching this video, you will know why and how SDMX is useful in your work with statistical data and metadata.

The Info Space is available directly from Eurostat website.

DailyTekk: Over 100 Incredible Infographic Tools and Resources (Categorized)

From DailyTekk: Over 100 Incredible Infographic Tools and Resources (Categorized)

February 27, 2012

Top 100

 I love a good infographic! After all, knowledge is power and the visualization of data makes absorbing information all the easier. Well-designed infographics have a way of pulling me into a subject I’d normally never care to know about. As a designer I can attest to the crazy amount of time it takes to make a compelling, useful infographic. I have to say I knew about many of the great links, resources and tools I’ve linked to here on this post before but I dug deep and found some new and exciting infographic tools that I’m willing to bet you haven’t seen before. Items 1-5 under the Data Visualization Tools and Software category are sufficiently capable of arming even a novice designer with the ability to produce a powerful infographic (though I’m sure experts will find them handy as well). In short, if you love infographics, data visualization and information design as much as I do, you’re going to love this post. As always, leave me a comment with your thoughts and suggestions!

Like this post? We’ve got a whole category dedicated to Top 100 lists!

Data Sources

 

1. DataMarket  – Find and understand data.
2. WorldMap  – Explore, visualize and publish geographic information.
3. Influence Explorer  – Provides overviews of political influence data for politicians.
4. US Census Bureau  – Measures America (people, places, economy).
5. Freebase  – An entity graph of people, places and things from Google.
6. World Bank Data  – The world at a glance (key development indicators).
7. Data360  – Telling compelling and data-driven stories.
8. Number Of  – You ask, they count.
9. Gallup  – Public opinion polls.
10. EveryBlock  – Uncovers info on large cities contained in government databases.
11. Daytum  – Helps you collect, organize and communicate your everyday data.
12. Google Public Data  - Filter and animate data sets from around the world.
13. Gapminder  - Displays time series of development statistics for all countries.
14. Munterbund  - Graphical visualization of text similarities in essays.

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